It was summer; the work was not heavy; there was no snow to
clear away, and the trains on that line were infrequent. Semyon
used to go over his verst twice a day, examine and screw up nuts
here and there, keep the bed level, look at the water-pipes, and then
go home to his own affairs. There was only one drawback—he
always had to get the inspector's permission for the least little thing
he wanted to do. Semyon and his wife were even beginning to be
bored.
Two months passed, and Semyon commenced to make the
acquaintance of his neighbours, the track-walkers on either side of
him. One was a very old man, whom the authorities were always
meaning to relieve. He scarcely moved out of his hut. His wife
used to do all his work. The other track-walker, nearer the station,
was a young man, thin, but muscular. He and Semyon met for the
first time on the line midway between the huts. Semyon took off
his hat and bowed. "Good health to you, neighbour," he said.
The neighbour glanced askance at him. "How do you do?" he
replied; then turned around and made off.
Later the wives met. Semyon's wife passed the time of day with
her neighbour, but neither did she say much.
On one occasion Semyon said to her: "Young woman, your
husband is not very talkative."
The woman said nothing at first, then replied: "But what is there
for him to talk about? Every one has his own business. Go your
way, and God be with you."
However, after another month or so they became acquainted.
Semyon would go with Vasily along the line, sit on the edge of a
pipe, smoke, and talk of life. Vasily, for the most part, kept silent,
but Semyon talked of his village, and of the campaign through
which he had passed.
"I have had no little sorrow in my day," he would say; "and goodness knows I have not lived long. God has not given me
happiness, but what He may give, so will it be. That's so, friend
Vasily Stepanych."
Vasily Stepanych knocked the ashes out of his pipe against a rail,
stood up, and said: "It is not luck which follows us in life, but
human beings. There is no crueller beast on this earth than man.
Wolf does not eat wolf, but man will readily devour man."
"Come, friend, don't say that; a wolf eats wolf."
"The words came into my mind and I said it. All the same, there is
nothing crueller than man. If it were not for his wickedness and
greed, it would be possible to live. Everybody tries to sting you to
the quick, to bite and eat you up."
Semyon pondered a bit. "I don't know, brother," he said; "perhaps it is as you say, and perhaps it is God's will."
"And perhaps," said Vasily, "it is waste of time for me to talk to you. To put everything unpleasant on God, and sit and suffer,
means, brother, being not a man but an animal. That's what I have
to say." And he turned and went off without saying good-bye.
Semyon also got up. "Neighbour," he called, "why do you lose your temper?" But his neighbour did not look round, and kept on
his way.
Semyon gazed after him until he was lost to sight in the cutting at
the turn. He went home and said to his wife: "Arina, our neighbour
is a wicked person, not a man."
However, they did not quarrel. They met again and discussed the
same topics.
"All, mend, if it were not for men we should not be poking in these huts," said Vasily, on one occasion.
"And what if we are poking in these huts? It's not so bad. You can
live in them."
"Live in them, indeed! Bah, you!… You have lived long and
learned little, looked at much and seen little. What sort of life is
there for a poor man in a hut here or there? The cannibals are
devouring you. They are sucking up all your life-blood, and when
you become old, they will throw you out just as they do husks to
feed the pigs on. What pay do you get?"
"Not much, Vasily Stepanych—twelve rubles."
"And I, thirteen and a half rubles. Why? By the regulations the
company should give us fifteen rubles a month with firing and
lighting. Who decides that you should have twelve rubles, or I
thirteen and a half? Ask yourself! And you say a man can live on
that? You understand it is not a question of one and a half rubles or
three rubles—even if they paid us each the whole fifteen rubles. I
was at the station last month. The director passed through. I saw
him. I had that honour. He had a separate coach. He came out and
stood on the platform… I shall not stay here long; I shall go
somewhere, anywhere, follow my nose."
"But where will you go, Stepanych? Leave well enough alone.
Here you have a house, warmth, a little piece of land. Your wife is
a worker."
"Land! You should look at my piece of land. Not a twig on it—
nothing. I planted some cabbages in the spring, just when the
inspector came along. He said: 'What is this? Why have you not
reported this? Why have you done this without permission? Dig
them up, roots and all.' He was drunk. Another time he would not
have said a word, but this time it struck him. Three rubles fine!…"
Vasily kept silent for a while, pulling at his pipe, then added
quietly: "A little more and I should have done for him."
"You are hot-tempered."
"No, I am not hot-tempered, but I tell the truth and think. Yes, he will still get a bloody nose from me. I will complain to the Chief.
We will see then!" And Vasily did complain to the Chief.
Once the Chief came to inspect the line. Three days later important
personages were coming from St. Petersburg and would pass over
the line. They were conducting an inquiry, so that previous to their
journey it was necessary to put everything in order. Ballast was
laid down, the bed was levelled, the sleepers carefully examined,
spikes driven in a bit, nuts screwed up, posts painted, and orders
given for yellow sand to be sprinkled at the level crossings. The
woman at the neighbouring hut turned her old man out to weed.
Semyon worked for a whole week. He put everything in order,
mended his kaftan, cleaned and polished his brass plate until it
fairly shone. Vasily also worked hard. The Chief arrived on a
trolley, four men working the handles and the levers making the
six wheels hum. The trolley travelled at twenty versts an hour, but
the wheels squeaked. It reached Semyon's hut, and he ran out and
reported in soldierly fashion. All appeared to be in repair.
"Have you been here long?" inquired the Chief.
"Since the second of May, your Excellency."
"All right. Thank you. And who is at hut No. 164?"
The traffic inspector (he was travelling with the Chief on the
trolley) replied: "Vasily Spiridov."
"Spiridov, Spiridov… Ah! is he the man against whom you made a
note last year?"
"He is."
"Well, we will see Vasily Spiridov. Go on!" The workmen laid to the handles, and the trolley got under way. Semyon watched it, and
thought, "There will be trouble between them and my neighbour."
About two hours later he started on his round. He saw some one
coming along the line from the cutting. Something white showed
on his head. Semyon began to look more attentively. It was Vasily.
He had a stick in his hand, a small bundle on his shoulder, and his
cheek was bound up in a handkerchief.
"Where are you off to?" cried Semyon.
Vasily came quite close. He was very pale, white as chalk, and his
eyes had a wild look. Almost choking, he muttered: "To town—to
Moscow—to the head office."
"Head office? Ah, you are going to complain, I suppose. Give it
up! Vasily Stepanych, forget it."
"No, mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See! He struck me in the face, drew blood. So long as I live I will not forget. I will not leave
it like this!"
Semyon took his hand. "Give it up, Stepanych. I am giving you
good advice. You will not better things…"
"Better things! I know myself I shan't better things. You were right about Fate. It would be better for me not to do it, but one must
stand up for the right." "But tell me, how did it happen?"
"How? He examined everything, got down from the trolley, looked
into the hut. I knew beforehand that he would be strict, and so I
had put everything into proper order. He was just going when I
made my complaint. He immediately cried out: 'Here is a
Government inquiry coming, and you make a complaint about a
vegetable garden. Here are privy councillors coming, and you
annoy me with cabbages!' I lost patience and said something—not
very much, but it offended him, and he struck me in the face. I
stood still; I did nothing, just as if what he did was perfectly all
right. They went off; I came to myself, washed my face, and left."
"And what about the hut?"
"My wife is staying there. She will look after things. Never mind
about their roads."
Vasily got up and collected himself. "Good-bye, Ivanov. I do not
know whether I shall get any one at the office to listen to me."
"Surely you are not going to walk?"
"At the station I will try to get on a freight train, and to-morrow I shall be in Moscow."
The neighbours bade each other farewell. Vasily was absent for
some time. His wife worked for him night and day. She never
slept, and wore herself out waiting for her husband. On the third
day the commission arrived. An engine, luggage-van, and two
first-class saloons; but Vasily was still away. Semyon saw his wife
on the fourth day. Her face was swollen from crying and her eyes
were red.
"Has your husband returned?" he asked. But the woman only made a gesture with her hands, and without saying a word went her way.
Semyon had learnt when still a lad to make flutes out of a kind of
reed. He used to burn out the heart of the stalk, make holes where
necessary, drill them, fix a mouthpiece at one end, and tune them
so well that it was possible to play almost any air on them. He
made a number of them in his spare time, and sent them by his
friends amongst the freight brakemen to the bazaar in the town. He
got two kopeks apiece for them. On the day following the visit of
the commission he left his wife at home to meet the six o'clock
train, and started off to the forest to cut some sticks. He went to the
end of his section—at this point the line made a sharp turn—
descended the embankment, and struck into the wood at the foot of
the mountain. About half a verst away there was a big marsh,
around which splendid reeds for his flutes grew. He cut a whole
bundle of stalks and started back home. The sun was already
dropping low, and in the dead stillness only the twittering of the
birds was audible, and the crackle of the dead wood under his feet.
As he walked along rapidly, he fancied he heard the clang of iron
striking iron, and he redoubled his pace. There was no repair going
on in his section. What did it mean? He emerged from the woods,
the railway embankment stood high before him; on the top a man
was squatting on the bed of the line busily engaged in something.
Semyon commenced quietly to crawl up towards him. He thought
it was some one after the nuts which secure the rails. He watched,
and the man got up, holding a crow-bar in his hand. He had
loosened a rail, so that it would move to one side. A mist swam
before Semyon's eyes; he wanted to cry out, but could not. It was
Vasily! Semyon scrambled up the bank, as Vasily with crow-bar
and wrench slid headlong down the other side.
"Vasily Stepanych! My dear friend, come back! Give me the crow-
bar. We will put the rail back; no one will know. Come back! Save
your soul from sin!"
Vasily did not look back, but disappeared into the woods.
Semyon stood before the rail which had been torn up. He threw
down his bundle of sticks. A train was due; not a freight, but a
passenger-train. And he had nothing with which to stop it, no flag.
He could not replace the rail and could not drive in the spikes with
his bare hands. It was necessary to run, absolutely necessary to run
to the hut for some tools. "God help me!" he murmured.
Semyon started running towards his hut. He was out of breath, but
still ran, falling every now and then. He had cleared the forest; he
was only a few hundred feet from his hut, not more, when he heard
the distant hooter of the factory sound—six o'clock! In two
minutes' time No. 7 train was due. "Oh, Lord! Have pity on
innocent souls!" In his mind Semyon saw the engine strike against
the loosened rail with its left wheel, shiver, careen, tear up and
splinter the sleepers—and just there, there was a curve and the
embankment seventy feet high, down which the engine would
topple—and the third-class carriages would be packed … little
children… All sitting in the train now, never dreaming of danger.
"Oh, Lord! Tell me what to do!… No, it is impossible to run to the
hut and get back in time."
Semyon did not run on to the hut, but turned back and ran faster
than before. He was running almost mechanically, blindly; he did
not know himself what was to happen. He ran as far as the rail
which had been pulled up; his sticks were lying in a heap. He bent
down, seized one without knowing why, and ran on farther. It
seemed to him the train was already coming. He heard the distant
whistle; he heard the quiet, even tremor of the rails; but his
strength was exhausted, he could run no farther, and came to a halt
about six hundred feet from the awful spot. Then an idea came into
his head, literally like a ray of light. Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his knife out of the upper part of his boot,
and crossed himself, muttering, "God bless me!"
He buried the knife in his left arm above the elbow; the blood
spurted out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf,
smoothed it out, tied it to the stick and hung out his red flag.
He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The
driver would not see him—would come close up, and a heavy train
cannot be pulled up in six hundred feet.
And the blood kept on flowing. Semyon pressed the sides of the
wound together so as to close it, but the blood did not diminish.
Evidently he had cut his arm very deep. His head commenced to
swim, black spots began to dance before his eyes, and then it
became dark. There was a ringing in his ears. He could not see the
train or hear the noise. Only one thought possessed him. "I shall
not be able to keep standing up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the
train will pass over me. Help me, oh Lord!"
All turned black before him, his mind became a blank, and he
dropped the flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the
ground. A hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching
train. The engineer saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam.
The train came to a standstill.
People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. They
saw a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and
another man standing beside him with a blood-stained rag on a
stick.
Vasily looked around at all. Then, lowering his head, he said:
"Bind me. I tore up a rail!"
THE DARLING
BY ANTON P. CHEKOV
Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor
Plemyanikov, was sitting on the back-door steps of her house
doing nothing. It was hot, the flies were nagging and teasing, and it
was pleasant to think that it would soon be evening. Dark rain
clouds were gathering from the east, wafting a breath of moisture
every now and then.
Kukin, who roomed in the wing of the same house, was standing in
the yard looking up at the sky. He was the manager of the Tivoli,
an open-air theatre.
"Again," he said despairingly. "Rain again. Rain, rain, rain! Every day rain! As though to spite me. I might as well stick my head into
a noose and be done with it. It's ruining me. Heavy losses every
day!" He wrung his hands, and continued, addressing Olenka:
"What a life, Olga Semyonovna! It's enough to make a man weep.
He works, he does his best, his very best, he tortures himself, he
passes sleepless nights, he thinks and thinks and thinks how to do
everything just right. And what's the result? He gives the public the
best operetta, the very best pantomime, excellent artists. But do
they want it? Have they the least appreciation of it? The public is
rude. The public is a great boor. The public wants a circus, a lot of
nonsense, a lot of stuff. And there's the weather. Look! Rain
almost every evening. It began to rain on the tenth of May, and it's
kept it up through the whole of June. It's simply awful. I can't get
any audiences, and don't I have to pay rent? Don't I have to pay the
actors?"
The next day towards evening the clouds gathered again, and
Kukin said with an hysterical laugh:
"Oh, I don't care. Let it do its worst. Let it drown the whole theatre, and me, too. All right, no luck for me in this world or the next. Let
the actors bring suit against me and drag me to court. What's the
court? Why not Siberia at hard labour, or even the scaffold? Ha,
ha, ha!"
It was the same on the third day.
Olenka listened to Kukin seriously, in silence. Sometimes tears
would rise to her eyes. At last Kukin's misfortune touched her. She
fell in love with him. He was short, gaunt, with a yellow face, and
curly hair combed back from his forehead, and a thin tenor voice.
His features puckered all up when he spoke. Despair was ever
inscribed on his face. And yet he awakened in Olenka a sincere,
deep feeling.
She was always loving somebody. She couldn't get on without
loving somebody. She had loved her sick father, who sat the whole
time in his armchair in a darkened room, breathing heavily. She
had loved her aunt, who came from Brianska once or twice a year
to visit them. And before that, when a pupil at the progymnasium,
she had loved her French teacher. She was a quiet, kind-hearted,
compassionate girl, with a soft gentle way about her. And she
made a very healthy, wholesome impression. Looking at her full,
rosy cheeks, at her soft white neck with the black mole, and at the
good naïve smile that always played on her face when something
pleasant was said, the men would think, "Not so bad," and would smile too; and the lady visitors, in the middle of the conversation,
would suddenly grasp her hand and exclaim, "You darling!" in a burst of delight.
The house, hers by inheritance, in which she had lived from birth,
was located at the outskirts of the city on the Gypsy Road, not far
from the Tivoli. From early evening till late at night she could hear
the music in the theatre and the bursting of the rockets; and it
seemed to her that Kukin was roaring and battling with his fate and
taking his chief enemy, the indifferent public, by assault. Her heart
melted softly, she felt no desire to sleep, and when Kukin returned
home towards morning, she tapped on her window-pane, and
through the curtains he saw her face and one shoulder and the kind
smile she gave him.
He proposed to her, and they were married. And when he had a
good look of her neck and her full vigorous shoulders, he clapped
his hands and said:
"You darling!"
He was happy. But it rained on their wedding-day, and the
expression of despair never left his face.
They got along well together. She sat in the cashier's box, kept the
theatre in order, wrote down the expenses, and paid out the
salaries. Her rosy cheeks, her kind naïve smile, like a halo around
her face, could be seen at the cashier's window, behind the scenes,
and in the café. She began to tell her friends that the theatre was
the greatest, the most important, the most essential thing in the
world, that it was the only place to obtain true enjoyment in and
become humanised and educated.
"But do you suppose the public appreciates it?" she asked. "What the public wants is the circus. Yesterday Vanichka and I gave
Faust Burlesqued, and almost all the boxes were empty. If we had given some silly nonsense, I assure you, the theatre would have
been overcrowded. To-morrow we'll put Orpheus in Hades on. Do
come."
Whatever Kukin said about the theatre and the actors, she repeated.
She spoke, as he did, with contempt of the public, of its
indifference to art, of its boorishness. She meddled in the
rehearsals, corrected the actors, watched the conduct of the
musicians; and when an unfavourable criticism appeared in the
local paper, she wept and went to the editor to argue with him.
The actors were fond of her and called her "Vanichka and I" and
"the darling." She was sorry for them and lent them small sums.
When they bilked her, she never complained to her husband; at the
utmost she shed a few tears.
In winter, too, they got along nicely together. They leased a theatre
in the town for the whole winter and sublet it for short periods to a
Little Russian theatrical company, to a conjuror and to the local
amateur players.
Olenka grew fuller and was always beaming with contentment;
while Kukin grew thinner and yellower and complained of his
terrible losses, though he did fairly well the whole winter. At night
he coughed, and she gave him raspberry syrup and lime water,
rubbed him with eau de Cologne, and wrapped him up in soft
coverings.
"You are my precious sweet," she said with perfect sincerity,
stroking his hair. "You are such a dear."
At Lent he went to Moscow to get his company together, and,
while without him, Olenka was unable to sleep. She sat at the
window the whole time, gazing at the stars. She likened herself to
the hens that are also uneasy and unable to sleep when their rooster
is out of the coop. Kukin was detained in Moscow. He wrote he
would be back during Easter Week, and in his letters discussed
arrangements already for the Tivoli. But late one night, before
Easter Monday, there was an ill-omened knocking at the wicket-
gate. It was like a knocking on a barrel—boom, boom, boom! The
sleepy cook ran barefooted, plashing through the puddles, to open
the gate.
"Open the gate, please," said some one in a hollow bass voice. "I have a telegram for you."
Olenka had received telegrams from her husband before; but this
time, somehow, she was numbed with terror. She opened the
telegram with trembling hands and read:
"Ivan Petrovich died suddenly to-day. Awaiting propt orders for
wuneral Tuesday."
That was the way the telegram was written—"wuneral"—and
another unintelligible word—"propt." The telegram was signed by the manager of the opera company.
"My dearest!" Olenka burst out sobbing. "Vanichka, my dearest, my sweetheart. Why did I ever meet you? Why did I ever get to
know you and love you? To whom have you abandoned your poor
Olenka, your poor, unhappy Olenka?"
Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankov Cemetery in
Moscow. Olenka returned home on Wednesday; and as soon as she
entered her house she threw herself on her bed and broke into such
loud sobbing that she could be heard in the street and in the
neighbouring yards.
"The darling!" said the neighbours, crossing themselves. "How Olga Semyonovna, the poor darling, is grieving!"
Three months afterwards Olenka was returning home from mass,
downhearted and in deep mourning. Beside her walked a man also
returning from church, Vasily Pustovalov, the manager of the
merchant Babakayev's lumber-yard. He was wearing a straw hat, a
white vest with a gold chain, and looked more like a landowner
than a business man.
"Everything has its ordained course, Olga Semyonovna," he said sedately, with sympathy in his voice. "And if any one near and
dear to us dies, then it means it was God's will and we